Unfortunately, your access has now expired. But there’s good news—by subscribing today, you will receive 22 issues of Booklist magazine, 4 issues of Book Links, and single-login access to Booklist Online and over 160,000 reviews.

Your access to Booklist Online has expired. If you still subscribe to the print magazine, please proceed to your profile page and check your subscriber number against a current magazine mailing label. (If your print subscription has lapsed, you will need to renew.)

Top 10 Biographies: 2014.

Seaman, Donna (author).

With the 100th anniversary of WWI on the horizon, our top 10 biographies reviewed in Booklist between June 2013 and May 2014 include portraits of two men with two very different WWI experiences, a president and a poet, as well as fresh appraisals of two world-altering human-rights activists, a writer of conscience, a towering artist, a musical genius, a movie star, the first woman astronaut, and the Muppets maker. There’s something here for every reader.

In her energetic and dramatic life of revolutionary activist Chavez, Pawel reveals his paradoxical nature and volatile relationships as well as his brilliantly strategic, courageous, and universally influential fight for migrant worker rights.

Guha recalibrates our understanding of Gandhi as he chronicles Gandhi’s youth in British India, studies in Britain, and years in South Africa, where apartheid catalyzed his commitment to a nonviolent struggle for human rights. A second volume will follow.

Here is writer Jack London whole, from his love of libraries to his “oyster pirate” adventures; Klondike escapades; world travels; 1,000-words-a-day commitment;courageous wife, Charmian; and fiery and compassionate books.

In his compelling, music-focused follow-up to Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans (2006), Brothers covers Armstrong’s most fertile period, from his arrival in Chicago in 1922 to join Joe “King” Oliver through the years of the Hot Five and Hot Seven.

Sherr uncovers fascinating aspects of the life of astronaut Sally Ride, from her tennis-star childhood to her college years in the male-dominated field of physics, her privacy regarding her sexual orientation, and her meteoric rise as America’s first woman in space.

Wilfred Owen, killed a week before the armistice at 25, is the greatest English-language poet of WWI who died fighting it, and Cuthbertson sensitively considers Owen’s childlike charm, objections to the war, and heroism at the front.